Embracing the Situation is Our Only Chance to Be Free

Embracing the situation

Is our only chance to be free

I'll side with you

If you side with me

—Wilco, “Side With the Seeds”

There’s been talk around here lately of great philosophers and mathematicians. Rose once had the kids looking at a picture of Raphael’s “School of Athens” and we often discuss who should be in the NBS Pantheon—Bucky Fuller, Abigail Adams, John Coltrane, Mother Teresa, Aung San Suu Kyi and lately even Joe Strummer. The kids have been talking about Plato’s cave and Socrates. My first-born son asked me about my teaching methods, and I confessed that I do often employ an adolescent-tinged version of the Socratic method, formalized by Plato as the elenctic style.

In this method the form of inquiry is a debate and questioning between individuals with opposing viewpoints in order to stimulate rational thinking and illuminate ideas. The conversation is meant to address difficult, indefinable, or non-concrete concepts—say, justice, morality, artistic expression, courage, love, the soul, or mercy. Theoretically, the Socratic questioner leads his interlocutors towards a new, more refined examination of the concept under consideration, thus leading to greater awareness. Some argue that the Socratic method is a negative form of knowledge acquisition, as it often results in the questioner revealing the ignorance of the interlocutors. However, Socrates believed that this awareness of one’s ignorance was essential to ultimate wisdom—true wisdom being predicated on the idea that there is always more to know and that answers could be continually sought and deepened.

The goal in the elenchic method, or at the end of a series of elenchi, is that the interlocutors should be lead by the Socratic questioner to a state of aporia—a state of puzzlement, doubt, impasse, or an awareness of the inadequacies or inconsistencies in previous beliefs, theories, or assumptions. Aporia was considered by Socrates to be good because it fostered sharpened questioning and renewed hunger for knowledge. By breaking down shallowly considered ideas, theories or misinterpretations, all participants move “beyond” their common, unquestioned knowledge. To arrive at such a point, Socrates believed, was “purgative;” one sees what he does not know, and so the desire grows to investigate and question further.

In a conference on Tuesday, one student, Rider, said that he felt most close to a fellow student, Henry, when they were working together and they were able play and have fun. Further, Rider felt confidence in Henry that Henry had deep down reserves of caring, integrity, and a desire to take their work seriously, and this inspired in him both security and pleasure.

“What is this feeling,” I asked.

“It’s sort of like I can float out on my own,” explained Rider, “To have a little fun, but I always know that I am anchored to something solid.”

“That should be our goal here,” a second student said. “To be able to be free but also float out, but not disconnect ourselves.”

“Disconnect ourselves from what?” I asked.

“We shouldn’t be disconnected from meaning, from what is down deep. We have to stay connected to deep feelings, and not only attach ourselves only to being funny, or making jokes, or goofing off.”

“Why not?”

“Because that only gets you so far. You don’t go anywhere new. And people can only go so far with you with superficial jokes. There is a limit to what you can express and see if you only stay on the surface.”

“So,” I said, “We’re talking about being in a place, really two places simultaneously, where you can have fun and delight, but also know that the meaning and purpose is close by and can be gotten to at any moment?”

“Yes.”

“Because?”

“Because it feels safer.”

“Like when?”

“Like when we have fun doing a science experiment, but we always know what the goal is, and we stay focused on it, and we work towards doing the experiment right, and we are trying to get somewhere.”

“And?”

“And I know that if something important happens, that that the important thing won’t stay hidden.”

Henry raised his hand.

“If I play my guitar only for myself, that’s not enough. For it to have meaning it has to be more than that. If it doesn’t affect other people, then it isn’t as important.”

Someone interrupted: “But it is important to do something for yourself.”

But he continued: “But it needs to have more meaning. The meaning of music comes when it is heard by someone else. I can have fun and meaning alone with music, but it’s not enough.”

“But doing something for yourself does mean something,” a classmate repeated.

“I know,” he continued. “But…”

“But you don’t want to keep your thing hidden. It has to come out and meet others. That’s what you want, yes?”

“Yes,” he said. Someone else picked up the thread.

“I hide the deeper parts of myself when I only focus on what is fun or what I am happy about,” said a girl.

“What’s wrong with expressing happiness?” I asked.

“Well, others will only see a sliver of me. I’m not giving my whole self to them.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is if I don’t show them the other good things in me.”

“Why don’t you show them the other things?”

“I don’t know…because those are more unknown and unresolved? The deeper things are the things I have doubts about.”

“And it’s harder to show those things? Why?”

“Because they are more…unsure.”

“If you don’t bring forth what you are unsure about, and only trollop around with what you’re jolly about, then what?”

“I don’t ever resolve or figure out the deeper things. And I drive everyone crazy.”

“Then you are only a shadow of yourself?”

“And stuck there,” someone interjects, “because you don’t go to the hard things or the things with meaning.”

I held up a crumpled piece of homework, a hastily scribbled math assignment.

“What happens if someone only shows this?”

“Then we are seeing only a crumpled sliver of that person.”

“What if this is the best that person can do. Do I accept it or not?” I asked.

“That’s not okay. Anyone can take care of a homework assignment. They should, anyway.”

“There’s a difference between ‘doing good work’ and ‘doing your best,’” someone offered. “Everyone needs to do their best work, but everyone’s may do different levels of work.”

“What difference does it make if it is crumpled or done fast as long as it is done?” I asked.

“Because it is part of showing that we care about what we are doing here. If we don’t care about it then what is the point of being here?”

“What difference does it make to you whether someone else does good work or not so long as you do?”

“We all have to care about what others are doing,” Nathan asserted.

“Why does it matter to a ninth grader if the seventh graders do their work well or crappy?”

“It isn’t that we are doing our work alone. We are doing it together. That’s what this school is. If one of us says they don’t care then that says it is okay to not care. Which is not okay.”

“It’s like what Rider was saying. If someone doesn’t do their best work, they are apart,” said Yared. “We have to bring them into us. We can’t let one single boat be separated from the big ship.”

“But how do we make that happen?”

“We have to break the thing that is causing someone to not care. But we have to be careful, because we have to be careful of what is inside them also.”

“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “Which is why Rider said he loved working with Henry, because he didn’t have to break anything. He only had to make something. Because he already knew that Henry cared about what he was doing. He knows that there is depth there, and is caring for what we are doing, and in that there is pleasure and purpose. So he feels not alone in his activity and work. So what are we looking for? So he stays with the big ship. So what is it we want?”

Someone raised another hand.

“The root of the root.”

“Huh.”

“The meaning behind what means something. Not just the caring, but why caring matters. WE want to be close to the root that makes them care. The root is an anchor, or a line to the meaning. It’s what makes caring. The essence of what we are doing.”

“The root of the root?”

“And if there’s something we don’t like?”

“We have to get to the root of it. The bottom of what’s the matter.”

“Even if someone does a bad thing.”

“Especially if someone does a bad thing.”

“Why?”

“We have to believe that what someone does has a reason. A root.”

“Okay.”

There was a pause. Then I told a story.

“There was a boy here. He was very strong. We had a large set of lockers that needed to be moved. He brought them down the basement stairs himself, straining and exerting himself He smashed his fingers on the door frame and then dragged the lockers across the basement, cussing the whole way. When it was in place twelve classmates surged forward, shreiking and squabbling to claim a locker. No one said thanks. This sent the boy into a rage. All these selfish teenyboppers not appreciating his work and fighting over the best locker. Disgusting. So, in anger, he went outside to the bicycle of one of the shrieking teenyboppers. With an Allen-wrench he loosened every nut on her mountian bike. That day she rode home, the bike fell apart, and she nearly rode into a passing truck. She could have been really hurt. So what is the meaning of this?”

“He was pissed.”

“Is that all?"

“There was a root to his action.”

“What was the root?”

“No one thanked him.”

“He felt his efforts were unappreciated and rejected.”

“So how did he respond?” I asked.

“With something hurtful, mean, destructive.”

“Did it solve the problem?”

“No, it made it worse?”

“What if I said his destroying the bike brought the issue up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, by screwing up her bike, he got a chance to say what was bothering him?”

“That was a destructive way to do it, then.”

“Why do you think he did it that way?”

A pause. Someone raised a hand.

"Because, it was like what Isabel said. That was the harder thing to see. if he said that he was hurt and rejected when he did a nice thing and that he needed someone to say thanks, that would be him admitting he needed other people. That would make him feel vulnerable, or weak.”

“Meaning he would be showing his feelings,” said someone else.

“Yes!” another girl blurted. “Just like Carl Tiflin in The Red Pony. He gets hurt, or he feels he might show his tender feelings, so he hurts things because he is afraid to show his feelings.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“That’s what the strong boy did. He hurt someone instead of showing his true feelings. Well, he showed his feelings, but not the right ones.”

“Because he felt disconnected or unsure.”

“Yes. But then he disconnected himself.”

“And he disconnected her bike,” Rider said.

“Interesting. He took things apart,” I said.

“So we should be putting things together?”

“Tightening things. Making everything fit together better.”

“But how do we do that?”

“It never ends. We have to just keep trying.”

“So now what?” I asked.

It was 10:30. Time for break. We’d been in the room all morning. We hadn’t gotten to the speeches we’d meant to read.

“Bryn,” I asked, “Do you have a poem for us?”

Bryn had signed up the read the poem that morning. She had been holding her book the whole time of the discussion—her book was The National Poetry Project.”

“I do,” she said, with pep in her voice.

“Fire it up.”

“Miles,” she asked, “Can you read his name? I can’t pronounce it.”

“Rabindranath Tagore,” Miles read carefully. “Gintajali 35 is the title.”

This is what she read.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the

Dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

All around the room all eyes were up, watching, looking at each other.

“Read it again.” I said. “Everybody, think about one line in that poem that connects to we just said, one sentence that is true to us or you today.”

She read it again.

“Bryn, did you have that poem picked out already, or did you pick it after you listened to this this morning?”

“I had one but I decided to read this during our talking.”

“So you were listening to everyone else, and you picked a poem to say what we said?”

“I guess so,” she said. She was beaming.

That’s how we got to break, and to the end of a day’s elenchi.

***

Bread and Puppet is a kind of museum, a record of the activity of a political and artistic sub-culture, and the repository of a life-time of work. The barn which house the old puppets is also very much like a cathedral, with high vaulted ceilings, hand-work of artisans tucked into every corner and towering or hanging above, a pantheon of figures and characters linking present time to past. After our tour, our lunch, our acquisitive, consuming ways in the Bread and Puppet museum store, and our visit to the Cheap Art Museum in a defunct school bus, we headed to the field with our speckled notebooks. I put a quote by Gandhi, whose birthday it was on Friday, on the “hand-out”— “In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.” The quote is loosely connected to our own arduous quest, but also, I wanted them to spend some time thinking in the solitude of the meadow fields across the road from the museum.

Where the museum is dense, dark, dusty, peopled with figures of the past, the field is bright and open, nestled above the valley, a green-golden-orange bounded bowl in the hills. In the cool afternoon we clustered together in the field in the cool afternoon for our instructions, and then we spread out, the cluster of us splitting up into groups, going further into the distance of the field, then in pairs, and finally, singly, disappearing into the pine grove or amphitheater or into the hollows. From the collective the individual, where we were alone in our thoughts for an hour, with no sound but the crows and cars passing in the road. In that large space we found some silence to point where the single most observable fact was the clouds passing in front of the sun, and warmth rising and then diminishing.

***

Later in the week we heard a speech that managed to imagine what happens when we are able to absorb into ourselves the beauty that we see and feel.

A stained white tank top and darker sports bra underneath stood off against my pale skin as I stood in front of my full-length mirror. I held out a hand and looked at my uneven nails and slightly longer fingers. I wore black soccer shorts and as I stared at my hair. It seemed to curl out into blonde frizz above my head as the air became more humid. My face was pale and dotted with some freckles and my eyebrows seemed too blonde to see. I didn’t like this image of myself and I didn’t want to be me anymore. I turned away and opened the door, so I wouldn’t have to pick out my imperfections. I walked down the smooth wooden stairs, walking slowly and biding my time. I reached the bottom, turned to grab my sneakers and left the house. I tied the shoelaces in place and stuck my earphones in my ears blocking out the sounds of everything around me except the pounding of my heart. I scrolled down the music list to podcasts and then to “This American Life”. I turned down the driveway and started to run, trying to forget everything and just listened to the voice of Ira Glass. “This American Life” is a radio show that has different themes every week and there are always different stories about people in America, their stories, stories that fit the theme. I loved listening to these. I had listened to at least thirty podcasts during the summer. It always made me stop thinking about how I felt about myself and whether I could change. Instead it put me in a place where I could think about other people’s stories and problems and what they went through. The sound of my sneakers was a kind of rhythm to keep me moving forward away from what I was always thinking about and what I never wanted to think about. A line of sweat slid down my forehead and I wiped it away with the back of my hand, just listening, trying to forget. I saw the long dirt road ahead just stretching on what seemed like forever and I just kept going because that’s what I had to do, it was the only thing to do. The trees were so perfectly green and true around me and the details that were easy to miss when I wasn’t looking were so clear to me and so amazing and beautiful. The veins in a glossy, wet leaf stood out against the smooth, rough gravel under my feet. A pale yellow and black butterfly perched on a leaf; lightly fluttering it’s fragile, beautiful wings. Wild flowers of the most breathtaking pinks and maroons stood planted in the ground, but swaying in the breeze so they didn’t seem grounded after all. I looked down at my thighs, they were bright red and wet with sweat. I looked straight ahead again, Stop thinking, I told myself, just let go. I turned the volume up higher and the voices of someone else filled my head, all meaningless noise, and I sprinted across the dirt road, my feet thudding on the warm ground, the wind and stones flying with me. And I felt like I never wanted to stop, just my soul running free, my body left in the dust as the rest of me raced ahead, completely free. But not just free, but happy to be who I was and happy that I was sprinting down a dirt road, in the middle of the woods at the foot of a mountain

Here the vision of external beauty is attained only when one can see beauty in themselves. Or, the beauty we see is an analog for what we want o see in ourselves. Maybe we try apprehending external beauty as away to practice believing those things about ourselves. And, in order for her to make her way to a new vision of herself, she listens to the stories of others. So we listen to her story about listening to Ira Glass and the sound of her feet. We see through her vision of the veined leaves to a vision of her.

Plato and Socrates also believed that a legitimate technique of teaching was “myth.” We use myth, or stories, constantly: our stories are really our own myths, or, we look back to common historical moments, past heroes, or the characters in our books to see the mythological forces at work. I use the stories of students I have taught in my Socratic elenchi, and so weave stories into the questioning as a way to elucidate responses or make ideas come clear. When the stories of the students join with the ideas we discover in our discussion, we are very near the best truth we can get.